I haven’t yet heard President Obama’s address to the Muslim world from start to finish. Instead, I caught sound bites and longer passages on the radio of a car I was driving yesterday across mountainous terrain. What I pieced together from three different public radio stations was refreshingly candid and at the same time sensitive to all.

As with his earlier address on race in America while still a candidate for election, the president treads where no other U.S. politician has dared to go. Unlike other presidents, Obama can speak of Islam from the familiarity of having lived in the world’s largest Muslim nation (Indonesia) and his paternal connections to the religion in Kenya.

Follow up:

These attributes were used by Obama’s critics during the election to demonstrate that he was “foreign” and un-American. I got a whiff of right-wing criticism Thursday when I lost one public radio station and struggled to find another. Someone, whom I couldn’t identify, was saying how foolish Obama was to go to Cairo University, a hotbed of jihadists, according to him. To visit the Muslim world was to lend sympathy to our enemies, or some such nonsense.

There are, of course, critics who believe the president didn’t go far enough in detailing his plan for reconciliation between Islam and the West, and others, although I didn’t hear them yesterday, who will say he gave away too much in acknowledging the agony of the Palestinians and denouncing settlements in the West Bank while, in his increasingly familiar balanced style, reminding the world of U.S. friendship with Israel and refuting the deniers of the Jewish Holocaust.

The America of which I want to be a part has found its voice in this president, not just in its measured rhetoric and reasonable tone, but in a broad accounting of history beginning with the European colonial period. Obama is at ease in the world, confident that history has given us this chance to intelligently address problems that have bedeviled us since the world wars of the twentieth century.

The president commended not only Gandhi but the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the anti-apartheid movement of South Africa to Muslims as models for conflict resolution, but he neglected one role model I wish he had held up: Malcolm X.

Unlike King (and Obama), Malcolm Little was not born to middle class comfort but to violence and poverty. It was only in turning to Islam that he found his way in the world and into the American political scene. The narrative is complicated by the less than orthodox history of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm’s defiance of Elijah Muhammed, which led ultimately to his violent death, but it need not be neat and tidy to resonate with the poor and dispossessed to whom radical Islam is so appealing. I suspect that the president and his speech writers avoid Malcolm X because of his early denunciation of “white devils” and his refusal to renounce violence, but anyone who has read his autobiography (with Alex Haley) or seen Denzel Washington’s portrayal of him in Spike Lee’s marvelous film knows the story is both deeper and more complex than the narrative that has been crafted around King’s life and work. (We’ve rounded off the jagged edges, and we still gloss over King’s denunciation of war and poverty.) Today, almost every American, embraces the Christian Dr. King while the Muslim Malcolm X is rarely acknowledged for his contribution to racial progress. It should not be overlooked that Malcolm X extended the concept of dignity to many African Americans who rejected Christianity for its ties to slavery and segregation.

And Obama was speaking to Muslims. Malcolm X’s attraction to Islam was immediate and visceral, and he embraced it wholeheartedly, making a pilgrimage to Mecca where for the first time he got a vision of how people (well, men) of all races could unite in a sense of oneness.

What I admire about Malcolm X was his capacity to change over time and to grow increasingly mature in his insight and compassion. Like Obama, he found his way without a father who could guide him. Like King, he paid for his beliefs with his life. We shall never know what either King or Malcolm X might have become in their later years, but I’m not alone in believing that they would have come together.

Obama was, of course, speaking not only to Muslims but to the rest of us. And it might help if all of us could acknowledge an American hero who was Muslim.